Access and use of electronic resources made available by the Becker Medical Library are governed by license agreements between the School of Medicine and publishers or third parties. Several of the electronic resources carry some restriction on their use. Access may be restricted by user location, number of concurrent users, and/or password.

In short, most people experience access limitations based on the network to which their computer is connected. Below is a quick breakdown of what can be accessed from various networks.

NIH Grant Support Index (GSI) and Other Metrics

NIH reviews the Grant Support Index (GSI) and encourages the use of metrics to assess the impact of NIH funding.

NIH has been considering metrics to measure the value and the impact resulting from NIH research funding. In January 2017, NIH announced a preliminary index called Research Commitment Index, a measure of grant support that goes beyond measures of funding and number of grants. See: Research Commitment Index: A New Tool for Describing Grant Support.

The GSI is a measure of grant support that does not solely focus on grant money, since differing areas of research inherently incur differing levels of cost. Instead, GSI assigns a point value to the various kinds of grants based on type, complexity, and size. Applications for NIH-funding that will support researchers who have GSIs over 21 (the equivalent of 3 single-PI R01 awards) will be expected to include a plan in their applications for how they would adjust those researchers’ existing grant load to be within the GSI limits if their application is awarded. While implementation of a GSI limit is estimated to affect only about 6 percent of NIH-funded investigators, we expect that, depending on the details of the implementation, it would free up about 1,600 new awards to broaden the pool of investigators conducting NIH research and improve the stability of the enterprise.

Dr. Collins also noted that the NIH will be seeking feedback from the scientific community on how to best implement the GSI.

An update about the modified GSI was presented at the June 8, 2017 meeting of the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director by Lawrence A. Tabak, Principal Deputy Director, NIH. See: Enhancing Stewardship: The Next Generation of Researchers Initiative. Among the points covered in the presentation included the need to develop short-term and long-term metrics for measuring the impact of NIH funding. One example of a short-term metric is a measure for grant support based on commitment, not dollars. Examples of long-term metrics include:

Disruptions in prevailing paradigms

Patents/licenses

New technologies

New medical interventions

Changes to medical practice

Improvements in public health

The update also included metrics that assess the influence of publications such as the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) and the NIH tool to calculate the RCR: iCite, and discussed the need to develop additional approaches. Going forward, NIH will encourage independent analyses of metrics that can be used to assess the impact of the NIH portfolio and all actions will continue to be informed by stakeholder input.